Wonderland or Not

I was 6 years old when The Joan Shorenstein (Barone) Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (with Marvin Kalb as founding director) released a study/proposal which called for the press to take more seriously their responsibility in the presidential elections.

The proposal called for two 90-minute debates between presidential candidates, and one such debate between vice presidential candidates. It also urged five sets of 30-to40-minute interviews with Presidential candidates discussing the same issues with moderators and experts, and finally paired 15-to-30-minute addresses to the nation by the Presidential candidates on the Sunday before election day. ( Study Calls for More TV Time for ‘92 Candidates, By ADAM CLYMER,
Published: September 4, 1991 - NYT)

Called the “Nine Sundays” proposal because of the nine Sundays which run from traditional Labor Day beginning of a campaign and Election Day the author’s of the study also suggested that no commercials interrupt these broadcasts. According to the study American democracy had been trivialized by photo opportunities, advertising, polls and sound bites.

If Mr. Kalb were dead he’d be rolling over in his grave at what the press has become to presidential elections, how little the public demands, and how the candidates allow the media to define them. He isn’t dead of course, I listened to him just this afternoon on Kojo - which is where I got reacquainted with Nine Sunday’s.

In 1991 Mr Kalb wanted to insure a “a serious textured tone to overall news coverage of a Presidential campaign.” He said it would also give “voters regular, predictable access to the candidates, over a sustained period of time” and would set “a framework for constructive televised exposure to the issues.”

That was then, and this is now. A change of scenario is more critical than ever. The public is ready for it, begging for it even.

What could be better than nine days of single subject discussions in which the candidates are not asked if they married for love or money, what their favorite sports team is, and no one has to bowl, or drink beer.

Last March Newt Gingrich called Current Debates ‘Lunacy’. Last May Mr. Kalb called the candidates out in a NYT op-ed “Nine Ways to Elect a President”. Gingrich proposed the “Nine Nineties in Nine” pledge asking the presidential candidates, should they become their parties’ nominees in 2008, to take part in nine, 90-minute “dialogues” in the nine weeks running from Labor Day to the general election. Last summer Gingrich and Kalb overnighted a copy of the pledge to each presidential candidate.

Nine weeks of serious competition discussion after which each candidate is allowed ten minutes to tell the public why they should not be voted off be the next President of the United States.

Then America votes.

The media gets their reality show, voting and all.

America is a sucker for reality shows.

One more thing:

Please, not on Sundays. No one watches television on Sundays. Greek prostitutes don’t work on Sundays. Our candidates shouldn’t either.

I’ll be back around tomorrow, tough week here, end of term.

Technorati Tags: 9 Sundays, Ποτέ την Κυριακή, Marvin Kalb, Never on Sunday, Nine Sundays, Politics

The final few weeks of this term allow little digression of thought.

With the headache inducing politics of the day becoming a determinant to peace of mind, I’ll stray from it, as even the anticipation of what presentation the media will choose to display on any given evening is enough to induce palpitations born of frustration.

For a short time it’s back to the day when knowing 1+1 = 2, and red was merely “not blue”, with no knowledge of states divided by ideological hue, was enough, an accomplishment even.

I’m catching up on a missed day, one night and one day lost is a lot to make up at the end of a term.

I spent last Thursday, shortly after midnight on until ten in the morning, at the hospital with Anna, my brother’s finance. In case you were one of the blogs I was scrolling through at the time you might have noticed someone resting on your blog for say…eight to ten hours…it was probably me. Yes you are good, but no one is that good.

It was horrible, not the ER visit so much, except for the fact that we were in the ER all night while they waited for a bed on the floor. This bed obtained not for 8 hours after we arrived.

Anna had her appendix out the next day, but was not seriously ill, just ill enough to keep her and do surgery the next day, and my brother arrived in time, so all was good. I missed a morning of school, had a few things to make up and remained less a nights sleep for a few days.

No, the horrible for me, both of us really, occurred when a hour and a half or so after we were settled into Anna’s ER birth they brought in the victim of an automobile accident. This hospital is not a trauma hospital, but if the trauma is bad enough, and the situation appears dire, the victim of the trauma is brought to the closest hospital and not flown to a certified trauma hospital. This was one of those situations, with the half room Anna was in only a few spaces from the room the trauma victim was admitted to.

We heard the noise, the soft rushing of feet among the staff as the patient was brought in, ( extremely quiet rushing considering the seriousness of the situation and the outcome) heard the calling of “Trauma Codes” to the ER - every individual known to possess an ounce of medical or surgical knowledge at that time called to this space, passing us by in a blur. It was only a brief period of time after the arrival of the victim, and the onslaught of medical professionals, that we heard screams coming from the area.

I have never heard such screams in my life, grief, disbelief, agony, all rolled into a few long piercing cries, echoing down the variety of ER corridors, as someone, we knew not who at the time, was screaming, “no, no, wake up, wake up” over, and over. Then silence.

We dared not ask really, though we did ask. We were told it was a car accident and eventually told the victim was young and died, which was pretty obvious from the screams anyway, but as is only right they wouldn’t tell us anything else, and only told us what they did because we were persistent, and obviously affected because we had heard the whole thing.

We sat there overwhelmed with the form of nausea one gets from these types of events. It may sound silly, but the sounds of the woman screaming the victim’s name, the grief stricken agony in her scream, and the knowledge of what that meant was rather jolting. I had never been that close to death of that kind before, nor had Anna.

It was not until the next morning, when I grabbed the local paper, I was able to find out the whole story. A young woman my age had a single car accident, and was, according to the paper, pronounced dead on arrival at the emergency room.

She wasn’t pronounced dead on arrival, of course – though probably the medical professionals knew she was going to be - they did try. I was there, they did what they call “a code” on her. and were calling for blood “stat”, and though I didn’t see it I know they tired to resuscitate her with CPR.

The paper said she only had one relative, her parents having died tragically in 2004, that being her sister who had just had her first child this past year. It must have been the sister screaming, I presumed, as I read the paper.

It just kind of made me stop, a slow rather ill feeling encompassing me again, feeling hollow for the moment while I thought about this girl, her death and the grief of her sister.

Happenstance. For having been at that place at that time, something having nothing directly to do with me will affect me in some way, no matter how small, for the rest of my life.

Once a month, on the 27th, a campaign to remind us we are not alone.

A campaign, small at this time but sure to grow, in which a simple question is asked.

AM I NOT HUMAN

We can sit by an rationalize on how the Olympic games are about athletes, sportsmanship, and coming together. We can try to convince ourselves The Olympics, and where they are being held, have nothing to do with the the plight of those who are being obliterated by their own government.

Or we can think, and post, about those who are rarely treated as, and sometimes not even seen as, human.

We can admit, that by ignoring the humanitarian plights, (in the face of such as Darfur it is immoral to do so), looking other way while the host of the Olympics considers it’s relationship with Khartoum, it’s financial investment in Sudan’s oil and the selling of arms to Khartoum to to be economics, and no violation of human rights, we are complicit.

We also have to remember that the United states is the largest arms exporter in the world, true we have more arms manufacturers, so that must be taken into account, yet according to the latest data accessible to yours truly…

Largest Importers:
Greece
South Korea
China
India
UAE
Poland
Turkey
Israel
Venezuela
South Africa
Pakistan

Largest Suppliers:

USA
Russia
Germany
France
Netherlands
UK
Italy
Spain
Sweden
China

According to The World Security Institute,

“the United States is sending unprecedented levels of military assistance to countries that it simultaneously criticizes for lack of respect for human rights and, in some cases, for questionable democratic processes. As a foreign policy, this is confusing, short-sighted and potentially very dangerous. Once weapons are delivered to a country, it becomes increasingly difficult to control how they are used, and prevent them from being illicitly diverted anywhere in the world. While these countries are currently considered important to U.S. efforts in the “war on terror” now, political and military instability makes their continued allegiance to the United States questionable. Arming such countries to the hilt with top-of-the-line U.S. weaponry could allow them to target the United States, or its allies or to allow the weapons to fall in the hands of enemies of the United States. Selling arms for short-term political gains undermines long-term U.S national security and strategic interests. “

By selling arms to countries who then sell to countries which obliterate their own, we are no better than those who sell directly to those countries.

What kind of game do we play when we spend billions on humanitarian aid yet to not push with all our political might for the tracking and prosecution of those who committed crimes against humanity in Darfur?

A losing game.
crossposted at Darfur:An Unforgivable Hell on Earth

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Technorati Tags: am i not human, human rights